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Recently I was on the look for affiliates, and one of the best ways to find them is to look for similar products and then look for the links to site. Some very interesting things started to appear when I started doing this.
I was doing research on one of favourite authors- Jim Edwards, because he tells it like it is (no fluff!) and his book, Turn Words into Traffic, is pure gold for anybody looking for free traffic from articles.
Now Jim publishes products via Clickbank. They also mange his affiliate program for him. Clickbank takes care of all the issues with the accepting credit card payments, affiliate tracking, paying affiliates and refunds etc.
The clickbank customer service is great and they are generally the leader when it comes to managing/selling downloadable information products.
From a linking or a search engine ranking point of view the links the affiliates don't count in your search engine ranking because logically, they don't go to your site- they are redirected by clickbank hop links. Affiliate links from Clickbank look something like this: hop.clickbank.net/?XXXX
It looks like Google is getting smarter and tracking not just links provided by clickbank but also other redirected links.
Lets look closer. By using the link command in Google when can see the links that Google "sees" as the most important. That's not to say it doesn't recognize (or include them it its calculations) all the many other links to a site, just doesn't show them all.
So in this case it would be:
link:[ include whole url: www.turnwordsintotraffic.com]
or use the google toolbar.
This bought some interesting links- one of them being a link from a well-known marketer and writer 'Tim Knox (prosperityandprofits.com) Now the link from Tims blog is a redirect. (It redirects so fast I can't tell if its an affiliate link or not!)
The link is something like this: /members/go.php?l=11 and is on the middle right
So in following logic, that the link doesn't actually show as a link to the site, Google must be following the link, working out that it is an affiliate link using clickbank and count it towards Jims site.
Lets have a look at another link:
www.biztipsblog.com/2007/10/drive-more-traf.html (see middle right for link)
By hovering over the link- you will see in the bottom status bar of the browser that this is definitely an affiliate link, which is also being counted towards Jim Edwards site TurnWordsintoTraffic.com
So what does this mean to you? This is a good this that Google does this, however keeping in mind that probably yahoo or MSN haven't followed Google in doing this. (yet to be checked at this time)
Be sure and plan or advise Affiliates to link to you using your keyword or a version of it
If you use clickbank and you allow clickback to manage all you affiliates, then you wont have much choice. I always recommend that you manage a list of your own affiliates using a sign up using aweber or a similar service - then send them to clickbank.
This also allows me to provide specific training for affiliates to help them make more sales- a win-win
Paul Easton is a self confessed online marketing nut- who helps from an "in the trenches, doing it" point of view. Free Guide: Get a Plan for free web Traffic here: SEO Training
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